About the author

Check out Katrina's HarperCollins site for more info

Katrina Kittle has just entered a very exciting new phase of her life. June 11th ended her six-year stint as a teacher at the Miami Valley School. It was an enormously rewarding six years and goodbyes were tougher and more emotionally intense than she expected, but she is thrilled and grateful to be a full-time writer for the year to come. June 12th ended her two-year stay at her most recent apartment. She has put her most beloved belongings into storage, sold the rest, and is embarking on a year as a gypsy. She is homeless (by choice) and will spend the next twelve months traveling and writing. Look for more regular blog reports on this "experiment in living my best life."

Katrina has lived in the Dayton, Ohio area for most of her life. She grew up in a home where books were prized possessions, and original stories and poems were given as gifts. Her father was a voracious “chain reader” who encouraged her to read widely and still greets her at the door with, “Did you bring me any books?” Her childhood was full of “horses and books and hiking in the woods and bossing the neighbor kids into huge theatrical productions.”

Originally interested in dance and theatre, Katrina studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts and Ohio University, first as a theatre major, then accepting an invitation to join the Honors Tutorial Program in English. She graduated from OU in 1990, with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Education, earning the honor of Outstanding Graduating Senior for both departments.

After graduating, Kittle taught high school Advanced Placement British Literature for five years, then spent several years freelancing as a children’s theatre director and creative writing instructor. She has worked as a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing workshops for several elementary, middle, and high schools; universities, and organizations. She has taught as young as third grade -- leading the student-written performance piece on “Why Do We Write?” at the World of Wonder Charter School in Dayton -- and has had an eighty-year old student in her Fiction Intensive at The Antioch Writers’ Workshop.

During “the freelance years,” Katrina also worked in case management support at the AIDS Foundation Miami Valley (now the AIDS Resource Center), cleaned houses (which she found “very Zen-like and perfect for the writing life: you get left alone with your hands busy doing mindless work while your brain can simmer story ideas"), and worked as a veterinary assistant.

Katrina then taught 6th and 7th grade English at the Miami Valley School in Dayton, where she directed a middle school play each year. If she were to remain teaching, she would wish to be nowhere else, but she is so grateful to be fulfilling a lifelong dream to write fulltime.

She is the author of Traveling Light and Two Truths and a Lie. Her third novel, The Kindness of Strangers, was released in February of 2006. Early chapters from this third novel earned Katrina grants from the Ohio Arts Council and from the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District. The Kindness of Strangers was selected as a BookSense pick for February, and was the Fiction Book winner for the 2006 Great Lakes Book Awards.

Katrina hopes to finish a draft of her fourth novel this summer (for real, this time!).

Katrina runs and studies Latin dance. She's also on a cooking spree (when she's "cooking" figuratively on a new book, she's usually cooking a lot literally, too). In addition to her favorite pesto, she's especially fond of a recent espresso-chocolate cake she discovered in Nigella Lawson's fabulous cookbook, Feast. She is also dabbling in Indian cooking and so far her friends are willing guinea pigs.

Katrina loves theatre and was thrilled to get in her theatre "fix" for the year by appearing in Soldiering On at the Dayton Theatre Guild last fall. She also couldn't turn down the opportunity to attempt her first one-person role, tackling David Sedaris's "Season's Greetings" in Holiday on Ice (also at the Guild) this past Christmas, even though it put her further behind in her writing.

Katrina loves to travel and took a birthday-present-to-herself wonderful trip to Italy last summer. It's included along with some other travel adventures in her occasional blog. Watch for more regular posts there about this year of living like a gypsy.

Katrina keeps Dayton, Ohio as her home base, where she is the proud aunt of Amy Jia—who wants to be a doctor, a garbage collector, or a pirate when she grows up—and Nathan—who loves to pretend to be a dog.